Untrue is altogether warmer than its predecessor. [Jan 2008, p.87]

While there is much here to admire, at its overblown worst Neon Bible is one of those records that takes itself too seriously to be taken seriously. [Apr 2007, p.90]

Thankfully, Phrenology is more therapy than quack science. [Feb 2003, p.86]

They're diminished by trying to touch too many bases, often lapsing into sub-Oasis stodge. [Oct 2003, p.114]

Musically, it's not exactly mould-shattering, a blend of surf and chirpy indie rock. They're at their most effective when they deliberately fray the edges. [May 2019, p.29]

CD2 is a quirky new mixtape which proves he's still up to his old tricks. [Dec 2008, p.116]

Mick Barr's guitar work is hugely impressive, apparently concerned with documenting an infinite number of riffs, but the length of the compositions--often around 12 minutes--rather test the limits of endurance. [Aug 2011, p.90]

While they are at their most comfortable when laying down the ZZ Top meets Black Flag hardcore boogie of 'Skull Socks and Rope Shoes,' it's difficult not to be charmed by their wit, style and salute to Southern rock. [Sep 2008, p.89]

Too often the crossover strategy mires these songs in the most banal cliches of dream pop and arena grunge. [Sep 2018, p.29]

In short, it needs a rigorous editor. [Feb 2005, p.94]

This is a very odd album. [Apr 2003, p.103]

If this is indeed, as rumoured, LCD's final bout, it finds them a little heavy and tired, but occasionally deceptively light on their feet. [Jun 2010, p.82]

It has its moments. [Nov 2016, p.39]

Lost And Safe is a move songwards, and though this promises greater coherence, it's at the expense of some of the group's wayward charm. [May 2005, p.97]

A rich saturnine, baroque-pop set full of romantic drama. Strings, piano and keyboard combine with muti-textured guitar in songs that, though engaging, tend toward the florid. [Feb 2024, p.30]

Songs, without exception, are well crafted but more often than not collapse into cloying jauntiness. [Dec 2004, p.153]

You could call it happy hardcore, even if there's nothing particularly upbeat about its content. [Feb 2012, p.83]

Drew's desire to be all things to all 'hoods is the weakness of the soundtrack to his debut movie. [Oct 2012, p.86]

There are some pleasantly elaborate, wayward songs here... Forays into funk and Tom Waits' scrapyard are cringe-inducing, though. [Sep 2004, p.110]

Listening to the ramalama of "Slow Drip" and "Hot Tubes" you can't help but cheer them on. [Nov 2010, p.102]

The Hunter feels purposely immediate. [Nov 2011, p.93]

There's an inherent creepiness in his frequently audacious work that makes it hard to connect with on an emotional level. [Jul 2018, p.33]

It does feel [like] a somewhat softer collection than its predecessor. [Feb 2012, p.84]

Growls and blast-beats come decorated with guitar work that explores scale after scale of diabolical pleasures. [Aug 2008, p.101]

Long on rhetoric, short on melodic structure, it's hard going. [Dec 2002, p.150]

Too eclectic for his own good, perhaps? [Sep 2005, p.100]

Glass Swords places him squarely out there on his own, programming the kind of computer-game fluoro-rave crunk that's easy to admire but hard to love. [Nov 2011, p.97]

Throughout, her lyrics betray a convincing world-weariness. [Oct 2017, p.24]

This is a more low-key collection. [Feb 2012, p.94]

It's relentlessly repetitive in style and mood, but Lindsey's howling hormonal rage still feels exhilarating. [Aug 2011, p.97]

The results are almost too intimate to bear. [Jun 2018, p.33]

The Renaissance offers a compromise between the rootsy East Coast rap he helped to define and the LP you imagine the label wanted. [Jan 2008, p.111]

On disc the effect can be bludgeoning--although you can hear that onstage it must make for a wild night out. [Mar 2017, p.26]

British Sea Power are still without a 'Wake Up' or a 'Float On' but Do You Like Rock Music? is exhilarating in its ambition, full of songs that will warm the cockles at whichever National Heritage site they choose to play next.

Pleasingly, the most difficult thing about the album is its name. [Dec 2008, p.116]

Just Us Kids in part repeats the forumla, targeting SUV drivers, filthy corporations, and Dick Cheney, in an affecting but familiar preach to the converted. [June 2008, p.97]

They could afford to take more liberties with the musical cliches thereof: listening to Gaslighter is a bit like eating 12 courses of dessert. [Oct 2020, p.29]

Dreamy, classic-sounding pop nuggets, sung by Cox with a wry, casual authority. [Jan 2011, p.79]

The addition of a horn section brings pleasing texture to the likes of "Hotel" and "Revisited," but it's rarely enough to lift The Antlers out of their willfully wounded torpor. [Jul 2014, p.69]

The DIY production can smother their delicate melodicism, and those parping horns can sound distinctly cheap and shrill. [Jan 2002, p.131]

They're still a little too in thrall to the obvious precursors to take flight, but there are some great, clanging pop songs here, too. [May 2016, p.78]

There's a less scrappy approach on this album, a glossier production with more realised and experimental offerings. [Jun 2017, p.28]

If at times it's a little too knowing for its own good, the music itself is less claustrophobic than before. [Nov 2007, p.121]

A disappointing triumph of retro-goth style over substance. [Jul 2013, p.80]

City of Refuge finds her back in Appalachian mode though, the songs shaded with fiddle, banjo and dulcimer and borne aloft by Washburn's airy voice. [Mar 2011, p.92]

You're left wishing these jazz quintet pieces breathed more. [Aug 2022, p.26]

We can enjoy Foxing's prophecies of impending doom, particularly when they're clothed in Animal Collective harmonies, U2 bombast and even avant-garde R&B. [Sep 2018, p.29]

Cherry's still youthful voice and angsty lyrics feel somewhat disconnected from these dubby rumbles and dirges. [Mar 2014, p.73]

Ten years ago this hand-stitched tapestry of astral-jazz harp, dusty acoustics, crackling breakbeats, music-box twinkles and twitchy "Intelligent Dance Music" might have seemed bravely genre-bending, but now it's as cosy a pair of favourite slippers. [Feb 2010, p.84]

That quest to explore her true colors is tenderly juxtaposed with some grand arrangements--woodwind, strings, marching drums--that bring to mind Minnie Riperton, Bond themes and '40s Disney movies. [Aug 2018, p.24]

[The first half is] all dismayingly unconvincing and lacklustre in execution... Then something changes.

There's an intriguing version of Michael Jackson's "Human Nature" and tunes by Monk and Ellington alongside originals that lurch from freaky modernism to stately classical. [Oct 2010, p.108]

While it's not a great record, the world would be a marginally better place if people were drooling over John Wizards rather than Vampire Weekend. [Sep 2013, p.90]

The atmosphere is organic and engaging, the only problem being that amid the fug of good vibes, no one remembered to write a killer song. [July 2008, p.94]

A madly ambitious, darkly despondent and goofily exuberant grand folly of a record. [Album of the Month, Dec 2005, p.98]

This is an exercise in extravagant claustrophobia, not nostagia. [Apr 2009, p.86]

Presumably bucketloads of fun live, the novelty wear thin on record. [Nov 2010, p.101]

A move into electric guitar, Hammond organ and bass bring mixed results. [Aug 2013, p.79]

Admittedly they hit a few soaring peaks, but none that haven't already been conquered. [Nov 2017, p.39]

The album's best tracks are those where Carlile strides beyond the confines of orthodox pop-country. [Apr 2018, p.24]

Some tracks lean too far towards tastefully decaffeinated worldbeat. But there are soulful depths and deliciously supple rhythms too. [Aug 2020, p.33]

On the first LP, the 60-piece Brussels Philharmonic adds top-heavy accompaniment to his melodic playing. .... On the second LP, however, the 11-member Umbria Jazz Orchestra sounds simultaneously nimbler and heavier. [May 2024, p.32]

Commendable ambitions, uneven results. [Sep 2017, p.26]

Gira's Angels side... loses its way in bluster and dirge. The Akron tracks, however, are a revelation. [Dec 2005, p.109]

The Antlers, fronted by the sepulcral warble of Peter Silberman, manage to distinguish themselves slightly from these shuffling, mournful legions by bringing to bear a gently epic sensibility that verges on the orchestral. [Jul 2011, p.77]

Oddball, but articulate, brimming over with a delight in language, "Bury" is a wonderful example of Mark Smith's transformative science fiction, and pretty much what one would hope to find on The Fall's first album for Domino records.

The band must from time to time stray from their stomping ground of doomed sailors and pining maidens, but one hopes the band will not steer too close to plain old indie rock. [May 2011, p.96]

It's almost as if the quieter tracks allow her to relax, while the full band numbers--fleshed out rather over-eagerly by a group containing several Mumfords and a Whale--subdue and constrain her. [Apr 2010, p.101]

For all the effective arrangements, most of the songs sound a bit anonymous. [Jun 2010, p.92]

Shuffle and skip for best results. [Jan 2016, p.71]

Each track has been precision-tooled for playlist perfection but even here the sheer class of "Rendezvous" and "Karma" shine through. [Aug 2018, p.35]

At times here it feels like Debbie Harry took a wrong turn on the way to Studio 54 and wound up with Shed 7.

It understandably struggles with a weightiness, an emotional claustrophobia. [Jun 2006, p.100]

It is, like LA itself, heavy on style. [Sep 2008, p.88]

Sadly the album’s latter stages revert to type, as Jónsi Birgisson’s quavering choirboy falsetto illuminates glacially paced piano and strings. All achingly lovely in a Coldplay-meets-Clannad way, of course, but Sigur Ros play too safe when they clearly have much more to offer than misty-eyed Celtic abstraction.

And though his long-running solo project has hitherto been a private sketchbook of laptop doodles, for this latest release Atlas Sound engages with the widerworld to great effect: the best two tracks are collaborations: the ambient bubblegum of "Walkabout" with Animal Collective's Panda Bear and the ectoplasmic Krautrock of "Quick Canal" with Laetitia from Stereolab. [Nov 2009, p. 81]

It's only the Can-meets-Canned-Heat avant-boogie of "Bees" and "Barnowl" that escape a sense of academic contrivance. [May 2005, p.95]

Their grandiose Baron Muchhausen indie rock does tend to veer toward indulgent. [Jul 2009, p.101]

This, the follow-up to his lo-fi 2010 debut Learning is a dark business. [Mar 2012, p.97]

DM's production is unfocused but showy and the album's postmodern lurches suggest a frustrating attention defecit disorder. [Jun 2006, p.90]

The sound is rather dry, and James Murphy's vocals have sounded stronger, but the different nuances audible in "Us V Them" and "Drunk Girls" make this if not a bang, certainly very far from a whimper. [Jan 2011, p.93]

It sometimes feels a little pedestrian, though Jurado excels when upping the pace. [Jun 2018, p.28]

Tracks like "Georgia" and "Holing Out" tear by with sandpaper efficiency and no little impact. Yet they have more than one idea. [Mar 2011, p.107]

Much of this album sounds like its been stitched together from 4AD's finest moments. [Dec 2008, p.88]

Doesn't quite make it into the Thompson solo Top 10.... But it's good to have him back. [Mar 2003, p.102]

On first hearing it's a little underwhelming, but its subtle charms certainly grows. [Jul 2023, p.30]

The downside of Stevens' inward journey is that it seems to have eroded his confidence, leading to a maddening tendency to sabotage his best tunes. [Nov 2010, p.82]

Replica feels less dreamy, more disquieting. [Dec 2011, p.92]

Those who like a little light and humour in their rock--or, indeed, an acknowledgement of the last 25 years of popular music--may find themselves unmoved. [Jan 2015, p.78]

Sahel Folk pushes no boundaries, but it's a charming, lo-fi set from northern Mali, delivered by a man who has been a quiet force for some years. [Feb 2011, p.103]

This one needed longer in the incubator. [Jun 2015, p.81]

His blend of house and Eurodisco soon settles into a bland formula of bittersweet Balearic fare. [Mar 2011, p.98]

If Matt Pike's current group High On Fire are a little less singular than Om, in thrall to the dark trash of Slayer and Celtic Frost, five albums have semn them chisel out their own grizzled, imposing image. [May 2010, p.90]

It's less a Kelis venture than it is a showcase for the various producers Virgin could afford. [Feb 2004, p.72]

The vast majority of it still sounds like what it was: cerebral, bloodless 'dance' music for junkies, the kind of posturing Gotham tripe we used to describe as "atonal" and "angular." [Aug 2003, p.120]

For all this sonic broad-mindedness, the Twins' ideas are piled on a lightweight core, and good luck making sense of the lyrics. [Jul 2005, p.104]

Elsewhere the good time roll with tuneful consistency as singer Cameron Omori arranges his affairs of the heart into three-minute teen-dreams called "Dance Away" and "Fallen In Love." [Jun 2011, p.96]

Having phased out the shoegaze from their sound, Blondes at times struggle to address the dancefloor head-on. [Oct 2013, p.63]